Fabled Shore

by Rose Macaulay

  For those who like parks (I do not) there is a handsome modern park along the sea front. For those who like nice crowded bathing beaches (I do not) there is a nice crowded bathing beach. I remembered how Mr. Joseph Townsend, visiting Malaga in 1786, had reported that all the young people bathed for hours by night in summer, and the female section of the sea, carefully segregated from the male, was defended from eager gentlemen by sentinels with loaded muskets. Deaths in such a cause were, no doubt, numerous among Malagueño señoritos. Strange things were in those days related to visiting Englishmen; Mr. Henry Swinburne, in 1775, was ‘assured that it was hardly possible to breathe in summer.’ This sounds like the kind of assurance made by those patriots who desire to defend their city from any suspicions of chilliness, and was probably made to Mr. Swinburne on a day when the cool levante was blowing from the sea, or the icy terral from the mountains. Malaga, when I was there, was not too hot, but breezy and pleasant.

  But I felt no temptation to stay there: as Murray succinctly expressed it, ‘one day will suffice.’ I went on in the evening to Torremolinos, about eight miles down the western side of Malaga bay. The mountains had withdrawn a little from the sea; the road ran a mile inland; the sunset burned on my right, over vines and canes and olive gardens. I came into Torremolinos, a pretty country place, with, close on the sea, the little Santa Clara hotel, white and tiled and rambling, with square arches and trellises and a white walled garden dropping down by stages to the sea. One could bathe either from the beach below, or from the garden, where a steep, cobbled path twisted down the rocks to a little terrace, from which one dropped down into ten feet of green water heaving gently against a rocky wall. A round full moon rose corn-coloured behind a fringe of palms. Swimming out to sea, I saw the whole of the bay, and the Malaga lights twinkling in the middle of it, as if the wedge of cheese were being devoured by a thousand fireflies. Behind the bay the dark mountains reared, with here and there a light. It was an exquisite bathe. After it I dined on a terrace in the garden; near me three young Englishmen were enjoying themselves with two pretty Spanish girls they had picked up in Malaga; they knew no Spanish, the señoritas no English, but this made them all the merrier. They were the first English tourists I had seen since I entered Spain;, they grew a little intoxicated, and they were also the first drunks I had seen in Spain. They were not very drunk, but one seldom sees Spaniards drunk at all.

  I got up early next morning and went down the garden path again to bathe. There were blue shadows on the white garden walls, and cactuses and aloes above them, and golden cucumbers and pumpkins and palms. I dropped into the green water and swam out; Malaga across the bay was golden pale like a pearl; the little playa of Torremolinos had fishing boats and nets on it and tiny lapping waves. Near me was a boat with fishermen, who were hacking mussels off the rocks and singing. The incredible beauty of the place and hour, of the smooth opal morning sea, shadowing to deep jade beneath the rocks, of the spread of the great bay, of the climbing, winding garden above with the blue shadows on its white walls, the golden pumpkins, the grey-green spears of the aloes, the arcaded terrace and rambling jumble of low buildings was like the returning memory of a dream long forgotten. Lumpy cathedrals, tiresome modern parks, smartly laid out avenidas and alamedas, tented and populated beaches, passed out of mind, washed away in this quiet sea whispering against shadowed rocks. I climbed the ladder to the platform, and went up the vine-trellised garden to my annexe.

  I had to go again into Malaga, to cash a cheque and get my exhaust pipe mended at a garage. They sawed off its end, and told me there was nothing to pay. I gave them ten pesetas and some English cigarettes, and told them how kind they were; they said I was muy simpatica, and we parted in mutual esteem. I like most Spanish mechanics very much; they are both clever and obliging, and often witty too. For that matter, so are most British and French mechanics; but the Spanish (or is it only the Andalucian?) negligence about payment is attractive.

  Going back again through Torremolinos, I picked up a stout and agreeable woman laden with bundles and baskets, who asked me if I could take her to Marbella, twenty-eight miles on, as she had missed the bus. I said yes by all means, if she was not in a hurry and would not mind my stopping to bathe somewhere on the way. She said that she would not mind at all, but strongly advised me to wait till we reached Marbella, which had the best beach in the world. She was a Marbella enthusiast; whenever I showed signs of admiring some sequestered cove or beach she assured me, with much fervour and gesticulation, that it was nothing to Marbella, which had the best beach in the world, and that when I saw Marbella I should never again want to bathe anywhere else. She had me in such a state of pleasant anticipation about Marbella that I sped quickly on. We talked agreeably all the way about her family, the coffee she was taking them, the beauty of her married daughter, the terrible price of food, why I had come to Spain, why I was alone, why Spanish women did not drive cars nor Spanish little girls ride donkeys in the streets like their brothers; that is to say, she did not really know why, only that it was ‘costumbre española,’ and the other ‘costumbre extranjera’. She was rather a delightful woman, handsome, stout, loquacious, beautifully mannered, comfortably off; either a peasant or a small Malaga bourgeoise; I liked her a great deal.

  We got to Marbella, which had a large, hot, quiet beach with a river running into it. The house which my companion was visiting was down by the shore; she invited me into it for refreshment, but I refused. Instead I drove down a track on to the sands, undressed in the car, and bathed. The beach and sea were pleasant enough, but, after all my anticipations, I was disappointed, and did not think Marbella all it had been cracked up to be. It was once important both as trading port and coast stronghold, and in the days when, as old engravings show, it was ringed about with towered Moorish walls, gradually falling to ruin, it must have been a very picturesque city, standing before the sea with the fruitful mountains behind it. It was then full of convents and churches, had a fine alameda of trees watered by fountains; and its port was full of ships being loaded with wines, figs and raisins. But ‘the present inhabitants,’ wrote a traveller of the 1770’s, ‘ “bear the character of an uncivil, inhospitable people, many of them descendants of the Moors, who still seem to resent the ill treatment of their forefathers; hence the Spanish proverb ‘Marbella es bella, pero no entrar en ella.” ’ The Marbellians seem in these days to have improved in civility, so perhaps they have now forgotten the ill treatment of their forefathers. The town is guarded by two forts, but in vain, for African barbarians crossed the sea in A.D. 170 and devastated it, with Malaga and the other towns on the Baetican shore, and the Moors took it quite easily in the eighth century, and the Catholic Monarchs, though with more difficulty, in the fifteenth. It was after that peopled with Christians. The Moriscos made some trouble there later, but were expelled, and after that, says the Cronica, the inhabitants of Marbella devoted themselves to art, industry and agriculture, leading lives happy and tranquil, rich in the abundant fruits of their soil and sea. Fishermen drew from the liquid element nets laden with the most savoury and delicious fish in Spain; the sardines in particular are of exquisite taste. In few ports does one enjoy such beautiful sea, and such a variety of admirable objects. Opposite one may observe the mountains of the Riff, on the right the Rock of Gibraltar. The country side (the description continues) is covered with vines and olives, oranges, pomegranates, wine presses, farm-houses, orchards. In the Plaza de la Constitution is a magnificent stone fountain. There is much trade and manufacture, and iron mines in the hills, and Marbella flourishes gready. Obviously a remarkable place. On first seeing it, Isabella the Catholic threw up her hands and exclaimed, ‘Que mar tan bella!’ like my companion of the road. But the mar, anyhow the Mediterranean mar, is always bella.

  I drove three kilometres on, to the half-ruined hamlet of San Pedro Alcantara, where a steep stony road turned up into the mountains for Ronda, thirty-five miles away. For the first twenty miles this track was covered w
ith loose flints; apparently it was being mended. It climbed up in steep zigzags above tremendous ravines; a great basin of pine-clad mountains opened out, range beyond range, on my left, brown and indigo and purple and softly mauve, stretching into hyacinth-blue distance. Over the ravine great birds flew with wide wings. On my right the rocky precipice rose sheer. They were silent mountains, and a silent track, till, as I rounded a sharp bend, three roadmenders hailed me, black-a-vised, unshaven, wanting a lift to ‘dieciocho’, the eighteenth-kilometre stone, ten miles on. They got in: I thought their weight would make it bad for the tyres over the sharp flints, but it proved all right. They were very kind roadmenders. One of them got out at a spring he knew of and filled my earthen pot with fresh water; they kept collecting things they had hidden behind bushes along the track. They left me at dieciocho, where a path to their village went down into the ravine. If ever in the future, one of them said, they could do anything to repay me for my kindness, I was to let them know at once. I said that I would; I hope that an opportunity may offer. Meanwhile, I went on through the mountains. The road became good for the last ten or fifteen miles before Ronda. The mountains presently levelled out into a spacious amphitheatre, in which Ronda stood high on a sheer rock.

  Barbaric, emphatic, noble-looking, yet questionable city: a chasm yawns across its face and across its history. For before the Moors made it known to the mediaeval world, under the name of Ronda, its existence is dubious. There have even been those who have said that the Moors built it new, quarrying material for it out of the ruined site now called Ronda la Vieja, seven miles north. But the Moors seldom built new cities; they enlarged and Arabized the Visigothic, Roman and Iberian cities and villages that they found. The present site of the Moorish half of Ronda, magnificently poised on its tremendous gorge, in the heart of that mountainous and embattled country, where peace never was, where turbulent tribes for ever warred with one another and with whatever dominant powers ruled them, cannot have been neglected either by Iberians, Romans or Visigoths. Indeed, Ronda is full of Roman relics and fragments; and the mosque on which the chief Christian church was built by the Christian conquerors was itself built on an earlier Visigoth temple. Ronda must always have been a place of importance; but under what name is unknown. Research has, I understand, dismissed Arunda and Acinipo (once held to be Ronda’s Roman ancestors) from that district of Spain. One cannot enter this trodden and obscure field of controversy. Enough that before me rose the Ronda of the Moors, the Ronda of twelve centuries of known and turbulent history, famed Ronda, the Mecca of American tourists and of many English, the Ronda of the Great Gorge. It had, said a fifteenth-century chronicler, at the time of the conquest a hundred mountain towns round it (mostly vanished long since), but Ronda was the queen of the serranía, and known as the strongest fort of Andalucia. Ronda, says a much later chronicler, is combated by the north wind, and also by those from east and west, by this last with so much strength that on various occasions it tears up by the roots even the most corpulent trees. Yet it is a healthy climate, the ailments in winter being mainly lung affections and constipation, in summer intermittent fevers produced by excess in eating fruit.

  As I drove up into the town, a group of lads threw stones at my car; I had heard before that this was an ancient Rondeño custom. I knew of a crippled Englishman staying in Ronda who had had to renounce his walks about the town because his foreignness and his lameness drew stones and jeers. I got out at the magnificent one-span eighteenth-century bridge, the Puente Nuevo, and looked down into the gorge, which is certainly very singular and noticeable. It is, of course, the great point about Ronda: whether it improves the look of the town or not might be argued; it depends on whether one likes towns to be cleft in two by a gorge, or whether one prefers them all in one piece. Be that as it may, it is a remarkably fine gorge, very wide and very deep; a Salvator Rosa kind of gorge. It actually has some water running in it - most unusual in Spanish rivers in summer. No wonder that the romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries adored it. Indeed, it is a romantic thing to stand on a bridge and look across from an old Moorish town of the eighth century to an old Spanish one of the fifteenth. Both towns, or rather, both halves of the town, have charm. The fifteenth-century town, the Mercadillo, a good deal rebuilt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is, for the most part, regular, clean and white; many of the houses have beautiful balconies and rejos; there are among them some narrow Moorish streets and Moorish houses. There is a handsome eighteenth-century bull ring, and a generally admired alameda with a fine precipitous view. But the more interesting part of Ronda is, of course, the older town, the Ciudad, with its narrow, twisting Moorish streets, and white houses with walnut doors. From one of the oldest houses, the Casa del Rey Moro (prettily restored and charmingly bijou, with terrace and patio and gorge view) stone steps cut into the rock by Christian slaves lead down into the Tajo. I did not go all the way down; after about a hundred steps I returned to the street, and followed it down past the two older bridges, the Moorish Puente Viejo and the later Puente de San Miguel. I got on to a path that wound down into the gorge and to the flour mills; the view of the river, the great bridge, and the sheer precipices on either side of the gorge, with apparently decadent houses clinging precariously to their edges, was, in the gathering dusk, intimidating in the extreme.

  It takes Baedeker (who does it very well) to describe how one steers a tortuous course about the maze of the Mercadillo and the Ciudad, the Tajo and the streets. It is, to say the truth, confusing, and I made little of it that evening. But next morning I arrived, largely by chance, at the various things that should be seen - the Renaissance house of the Marqués de Salvatierra (or so I was informed, though it had 1798 above the family arms on its carved stone door); various Arab houses and arches, various pretty plazas with ochre churches and charming belfries. The best church was Santa Maria Mayor, a fascinating pastiche - mosque (of which some remains) built on Visigothic (nothing to be seen), 1485 Gothic on the mosque, sixteenth and seventeenth-century extension on to this, very rich spacious and plateresque, with fine jasper pillars. There are other churches; and there is the Alcázaba, begun by the Romans, continued by the Goths, and finished by the Moors, and rebuilt after the French blew it up in 1809; it was once the most impregnable fortress in Bætica. There was a strong and active resistance movement to the French in Ronda; the Rondeños were adept at maquis methods, and the French did not enjoy their occupation of this town.

  I should have liked, but had not time, to visit the ruins of Ronda la Vieja; they are said, however, to be now negligible. I should have liked too, given time, to explore the serranía for the sites of all the perished towns of the neighbourhood listed in the fifteenth century. And how many little Iberian-Roman-Moorish villages and walled towns are still extant in these mountains, seldom visited because too remote? Ronda is famous, because of its size and its eccentric gorge, so admirable, so picturesque, so serviceable for the throwing down of enemies and slain bulls. But the mountains and ravines of Andalucia are set with the crumbling walled villages where Moors and Christians settled, desiring to live their lives unmolested, and to molest, so far as might be, the lives of others.

  I left Ronda at noon, for the magnificent silence of the mountain road, where there moved only a few donkeys with loads and a few groups of roadmenders; I passed my three friends of yesterday, who waved their hats and called greetings. And so down through the great wild blue-shadowed sierras to the Mediterranean road again, smooth, easy and civilized, rich with sugar canes, orange groves, bananas and tropical plants. All along it were white villages. At Estepona ships were building on the beach, and donkeys ambled along untended with huge loads of straw and chaff. Beyond Estepona there was a pleasant beach, with a cove between two spurs of rock, one of which jutted out to sea. I thought I would bathe from these rocks, but a guardia civil emerged from a hut on the road above and told me that this beach belonged to an English general at Gibraltar, who allowed no one to bathe t
here. People might only bathe from the other side of the further rocks. It seemed that the general owned about half a kilometre of beach. I asked if I might swim out from further down the shore and land on the rocks of the general; the guard said no, the general did not permit that one landed on his rocks. Does the general own the sea too? I asked. Yes, the sea also was the general’s. For how far out? For two kilometres, replied the guard - further than I would wish to swim, and I agreed. Who, I asked him, is this general, and how much does he pay for all this beach, sea and rock? The guard did not know the general’s name, but believed that he paid nothing at all. The guard was a pleasant man, and had a sense of humour. It seemed either that the cove was a gift to the English general from the Spanish nation, which, in view of Gibraltar, was generous; or that the general had, with true casual British imperialism, just annexed it, and engaged a guard to defend it. I felt my customary admiring pride in the exploits of my countrymen, and thought there should be a Union Jack flying over the beach. It was Sunday afternoon; some Spanish families came presently to bathe and picnic; we were all warned off the general’s cove and had to bathe further down. But it was a pleasant bathe, in that warm and scintillating afternoon sea. It was, I reflected, one of my last Mediterranean bathes, for it was only about twenty-five miles to the Straits, the Pillars of Hercules, where the known world ended and the dark bottomless void of the misty Ocean began.

  I drove along towards this dubious bourne, the blue of the Middle Sea still bright and familiar at my side. A stout woman and her three ‘niños’ (large creatures of about sixteen), begged a lift, and crowded into the car, sitting on one another’s knees and on my piled luggage; they were going to San Roque. I did not like them much; four passengers were too many for the loaded car, and they had shoved away a frail-looking old woman who had also wanted a lift; I had rather that the boy had walked, and was vexed that I had lacked the strength of mind to say so. I was glad when they relieved me of their forty stone or so of weight at San Roque. San Roque, five miles short of Gibraltar, is a picturesque-looking, crowded hill town, created a city after 1704, when many of the Spanish refugees from Gibraltar settled in the village and in Los Barrios and Algeciras. Here the Spanish archives from Gibraltar were removed, and here the inhabitants settled down to wait for the recovery of their homes. They made, partly out of material quarried from the ancient ruins of Carteia, seven miles on round the bay, a characteristic and rather beautiful little brown Spanish town, climbing up, with flagged sidewalks and small plazas, to the Plaza Mayor at the summit. From here, and from the cañones above it, there is a magnificent view of Algeciras Bay, and the Straits with Calpe and Abyle guarding them, and Las Palmas out to sea, and, north, east and west, sierra sweeping behind sierra, lilac brown under the hot blue. In the plaza Mayor is the church of Santa Maria de la Coronada, named after the mother church in Gibraltar, and preserving such treasures and images as were smuggled out of the clutches of the profane invaders. All about San Roque are delightful houses and patios, of the kind that were probably in Gibraltar before the British took it and transformed it, and before the guns of the Great Siege later smashed them up. Spanish Gibraltar must have looked very charming, with its jumble of tiled and patio’d Moorish-Spanish houses lying between the Rock and the sea. I fancied resentful glances at my G.B. car.